Category Archives: Feminism

As a person who’s actually tentatively planning a cosplay this year for LFCC – and as a person in the atheist community who’s been honestly fucking apalled by how stupid the whole “sex discrimination regulation” things have been at TAM! and such – then I feel like this has to be said:

“Cosplay is NOT Consent aims to educate the community by using the experiences of cosplayers, and convention staff to help put an end to unwanted harassment of convention attendees. We will work with convention owners to help bring comfort and safety back to fan events all around the world. “

The other day my girlfriend jokingly asked: “Is it bad that I kinda want to play the new Tomb Raider game?” Which of course led to me gushing about how they were some of the first games I ever played, and about how much I love them.

“The developers tried to create a world without sexism (perhaps in response to the stigma associated with the series). That comes with problems of its own. But in doing so they also created a game that places agency in a woman’s hands.”

It even used the word “agency”, one of my favourite words ever. Fuck yeah!

Not that I really need The Border House’s consent to like a game, warts-or-lack-thereof and all. But it helps!

Combine that with the fact that Bioshock: Infinite came out this week, and is not only awesome, but has Elizabeth as a central character, and I’m feeling pretty good about gaming at the moment. I just wish I had a computer that could run anything beyond Portal.

[I’ve been absent for the last few months, and if it weren’t for the fact that I’ve got at least 200 posts under my belt, I’d be worried that I’d achieved my second greatest fear: becoming this guy.

No apologies, though.]

Today – well, a few days ago – I got linked to this. For those of you who haven’t clicked through, it’s an article describing the opinions of many young people* at a rally to “protect traditional marriage”. Now, the ideas are obviously atrocious; this is plain for all to see. But why is it that none of them can spell or write? I mean, just look at this: Read the rest of this entry →

Essentially, the article is about those ridiculously sexualised pictures on the covers of fantasy novels. (And Sci-Fi, although to my knowledge all modern Sci-Fi novels seem to have covers like this and this; landscapes and space-ships/vehicles with very few people, sexualised or otherwise, even present. A conversation for another day…)

And it mentions all the things that I would want to mention. Primarily, it talks about Jim Hines and Hawkeye. Now, though I find it very interesting that, in a post about feminism, the first person the writer strives to talk about is what some middle aged white bloke is doing, I suppose that is our purpose as allies. Sigh.

For the uninititated, Jim Hines is a fantasy writer with a lot of free time and good ideas; and the Hawkeye Initiative is a great idea by an artist with a lot of free time. And they both seem to have come up with the same idea at least semi-independently. Which is: Parody the Living Fuck out of Sexist covers.

Sexist covers like this.

And this.

The whole point is that if neither Jim Hines nor Hawkeye can look attractive or even comfortable imitating your cover, then there’s something wrong with it.

This is, of course, the perfect blend of “making laugh at an issue” and “making you aware of an issue” – the best way to get your point across. The point being that these covers are pointless and make us nerds look like complete assholes and sexually ignorant perverts. I’ve never bought a comic on the grounds of “PWITTY COVER WIV LADIEZ”*, and even I’d be embarassed about reading a book like that on the train.

Meanwhile, Tracy Hurley talks about why she thinks this happens, and I get to find out about her “Prismatic Art Collection”, a directory of artists who draw characters who are not just skinny white girls in bikinis and muscly white men with swords.

Since I am a lanky, weedy guy, I can’t really associate with muscley folks like Conan, and if my being catered to means that there are also more people drawing… you know, the entire rest of the gamut of skin tones, body shapes and levels of attractiveness that aren’t white, skinny and inhumanly attractive, then even better!

Rant over; you should go read the article, to congratulate and support the BBC for, like usual, taking the right stand on an issue, and making people aware of… well, the stuff in the article that you should be going to read.

[Trigger warning for a lot of stuff. Not here, but on some of the links. Mostly slurs and some rape jokes.]

Whilst browsing the blogs, I came across this post by Feminist Fiction, and it raised some similarities with recent developments in the skeptical community which I felt like sharing. But first, some background.

I am a brony. You all should know that. In fact, I am pleased to say that I am one of the guys mentioned in FF’s post as buying and proudly wearing my Twilight Sparkle and Rainbow Dash* badges. Because Twilight, Dash and the Mane Six all kick ass, and the brony/pegasister fandom is an awesome one – in my experience, it’s always been full of creativity, love, and care.

“Love”? On the internet hate-machine? What a novel idea!

So I was horrified to find out about the sort of abuse that went on at Everfree convention a while back. You really would think that this fandom should be free of misogyny. Transphobic slurs, molestation jokes and country matters prove otherwise.

It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise that I agree with her. With bombshells like this being dropped like it was 1942 – Jen, Natalie, the unflinching shit chucked at Rebecca Watson and the endless shitstorms over what should be common sense – I’m just surprised all of this isn’t having more of an impact.

“Now it’s time for a third wave – a wave that isn’t just a bunch of “middle-class, white, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied men” patting themselves on the back for debunking homeopathy for the 983258th time or thinking up yet another great zinger to use against Young Earth Creationists.

It’s time for a wave that cares about how religion affects everyone and that applies skepticism to everything, including social issues like sexism, racism, politics, poverty, and crime. We can criticize religion and irrational thinking just as unabashedly and just as publicly, but we need to stop exempting ourselves from that criticism.”

We need to do this. And though I don’t mean to be patrirachal, the best thing that we, the old guard of straight white cisgendered men can do is to think how we can play midwife to this sort of awakening.

Who knows? Maybe at some point this week, I might write an article detailing what (I think) the role of the ally such as myself is in this situation. Because seriously, this? That thing up there?

It has to happen.

* * *

Oh look – Skepchick’s hard at work on this already, with a series of straight old white guys talking about why they’re allies, including: